By judged score, the best chocolate in the world is whatever sits at #1 on this list — the ranking follows International Chocolate Awards (ICA) results rather than opinion, so the top spot changes as new competition scores are published. Every bar in the top ten scored 90+ out of 100 from professional judges, which puts them in the top fraction of a percent of all chocolate made anywhere.

The International Chocolate Awards is the leading independent competition for fine chocolate. Panels of trained judges blind-taste entries from craft chocolate makers worldwide and score them on flavor, texture, and technical execution, awarding gold, silver, and bronze at regional and world finals. Because judging is blind and independent, ICA scores are the closest thing chocolate has to an objective quality benchmark.

Each bar is ranked by its International Chocolate Awards judges' score on a 100-point scale — you can see the exact score on every bar in the list. We don't adjust the order editorially: the highest-scoring award-winning bars we stock sit at the top, whether they're dark, milk, white, or flavored.

Continuously. New bars join when fresh ICA results are published or when we bring a newly awarded maker into the shop, and bars leave when they sell out for the season. Rankings, prices, and availability on this page reflect the live Bar & Cocoa catalog.

Every bar on this list is sold by Bar & Cocoa and ships from our US warehouse — click any bar to go straight to its product page, or use the add-to-cart buttons on this page. We import directly from the craft makers and store everything temperature-controlled, so the chocolate arrives the way the maker intended.

Mass-market chocolate is engineered for shelf life and uniformity, usually from bulk cacao with added vanilla and extra sugar. The bars here are craft (bean-to-bar) chocolate: small makers source high-grade cacao from specific farms, then roast, grind, and temper it themselves to showcase the bean's natural flavor — which is why judges score them among the tastiest chocolate in the world, with notes ranging from raspberry and caramel to smoke and spice.